Hans Reiser: Once a Linux Visionary, Now Accused of Murder

Arraigned for murder in October 2006, Reiser is being held in Santa Rita Jail near San Francisco.

Hans Reiser is waiting for me, standing on the other side of an imitation-wood table. The room is small, the concrete walls bare. A guard locks the steel door from the outside. There is no sound. Reiser is wearing the red jumpsuit of a prisoner in solitary confinement, though he has been allowed to meet with me in this chilly visiting room. There was a time when he was known as a cantankerous but visionary open source programmer. His work was funded by the government; he was widely credited (and sometimes reviled) for rethinking the structure of the Linux operating system. Now he is known as prisoner BFP563.

I stick out my hand. It’s an awkward moment — his wrists are chained to his waist. It’s mid-December now, and he’s been in this jail 40 miles east of San Francisco for two months, ever since the Alameda County District Attorney’s office accused him of murdering Nina Reiser, his estranged wife. The police found drops of her blood in Reiser’s house and car, and, when they picked him up on an Oakland street to swab his mouth for DNA, he was carrying his passport and $8,960 in cash in a fanny pack. At the police station, they photographed his body for signs of scratches or bruises. None were found. By this time, though, he had been under surveillance for three weeks. The police had followed him on foot, tailed his car, and even tracked him by airplane. On October 10, he was arrested, locked up, and, days later, charged with murder. (His trial is set to begin in July.) His only visitors have been his lawyers and his parents. I’m the first new face he’s seen from the outside world.

I’m here because his defense lawyer thinks I will understand Reiser. The accused is a 43-year-old geek — he lives in his own world of computer code, videogames, and science fiction books. He spent his early twenties developing a role-playing game to compete with Dungeons & Dragons while writing a novel about aliens invading Earth. By age 30, he’d decided that his talents would be better applied to recrafting overlooked aspects of the Linux operating system. As a technology writer, I frequently meet people like this. Just because he doesn’t behave like the rest of us — and just because he evaded police surveillance and bought a book titled Masterpieces of Murder shortly after his wife’s disappearance — doesn’t mean he’s guilty. I have been asked to try to understand this, to try to understand the man.

A file system organizes data on a computer. When you double-click a Microsoft Word document on your desktop, for instance, the file system tells the processor where to find the data. When you upload a picture from your camera, the file system decides how to place the information on your hard drive. Every bit and byte — including the operating system itself — has its place in the layers upon layers of branching directories. “A file system represents the roads and waterways of the OS,” Reiser tells me.

For the past two decades, he has struggled to create a different method of organizing data. His approach, known as ReiserFS, is a file system unlike any other. Rather than assign data a fixed location on a hard drive, it uses algorithms to frequently reposition information, including the code that makes up the file system itself. It elegantly maximizes storage space, but it can also complicate data recovery when a computer crashes. If the algorithms are corrupted, the file system will be unable to locate its own position. All the data it organizes disappears into an indistinguishable mass of 0s and 1s. The contents of that hard drive will be irretrievably lost.

In Reiser’s case, a critical piece of data — the location of Nina Reiser — has gone missing. Alameda County prosecutors think there’s an explanation for her disappearance; they blame Reiser, a computer expert with a penchant for violent videogames. Reiser denies killing his wife. The two had been separated for 27 months when she disappeared, and her body has not been found. Reiser has so far relied on the Geek Defense. It boils down to this: I may be awkward, a little weird, and prone to convoluted theories about nearly everything. But I am not a killer.

On the overcast Sunday of Labor Day weekend 2006, Nina Reiser goes shopping at a crowded Berkeley, California, grocery store. Although she has been living in the US for nearly eight years, she was born and raised in Russia at a time when stores like this didn’t exist. The place is stocked with heirloom tomatoes and vegan burgers, and Nina loads up her cart. She brings along her son, Rory, 6, and daughter, Niorline, 5. After depositing the groceries in her minivan, she drives to the quiet neighborhood where her husband now lives with his mother. Reiser will have the kids for the rest of the weekend. Rory tells two versions of what happened next:

+ znode *left_child; + znode *right_child;

Version 00 When questioned by police, Rory says he and his sister went down to the basement as soon as they arrived at his grandmother’s house, leaving his parents upstairs. A few minutes later, he heard them raising their voices and using “not nice words.” He went back upstairs, but his father told him to go back to the basement. Rory turned and walked back downstairs. This was the last time he ever saw his mother.

>

Version 01 On the witness stand during the December hearing to determine whether his father should be tried for murder, Rory tells the court that he came back upstairs and stayed in the entryway with his mother and father. They were not arguing. His mother gave him a hug good-bye. Then she walked out the door and got in the van. He watched her drive away. This was the last time he ever saw his mother.

Reiser is crying. He is pale, unshaven, and his stubble is flecked with white. His nose is running. It’s hard for him to wipe it with his hands shackled. This is my second visit to the jail, and he has deteriorated in the past six weeks. He tells me that he’s tormented by what’s happened to his two children. After Nina disappeared, the Alameda County social services agency put Rory and Niorline in a foster home at the urging of police. Two weeks later, the county family court released them to Nina’s mother, who took them to Russia for the holidays. It’s now late January. They were supposed to return weeks ago. Instead, a letter arrived from a lawyer in Russia, explaining that the kids were terrified of the US and would not return.

Nina Reiser, an obstetrician and mother of two, has not been seen since September 2006. Police believe she was murdered, but her body has not been found.

Reiser is facing other losses as well. Novell, one of the largest Linux distributors to include his software, dropped his file system from its future offerings two days after his arrest. The process of preparing Reiser4, his next-generation code, for inclusion in the Linux kernel has all but stopped as his time and cash have been redirected toward his defense. He can’t make payroll for Namesys, his file system company.

“Programs are in some sense our children,” Reiser tells me. He explains that programs can be discriminated against just like people. That’s why he wanted to raise his file system in the open source community, where people and programs are encouraged to interact free of corporate barriers to communication. The point wasn’t to make a lot of money. It was to make the world a better place.

Reiser4 is built on this principle. It contains a single registry — known as a balanced tree — to organize every piece of data in the operating system. All programs can employ the same nomenclature to access information. In the traditional Windows or Unix file system, each application uses different terminology to track data. As a result, programs don’t communicate efficiently with one another, which creates walls between data. In Reiser’s idealized vision, a simple search for the word “Nina,” for instance, will turn up emails in Outlook, images stored in MyPictures, and credit card charges in Quicken. Google’s desktop search and Apple’s Spotlight feature can do this, but they’re afterthoughts: The ability of Reiser4 to scour every document is embedded in the operating system itself. It lays the foundation for a digital universe where there is no discrimination — nothing is walled off. In this unified space, all things can be known.

+ context->super = super; + context->magic = context_magic;

St. Petersburg, Russia. Winter 1999. An American walks into a warm café looking for a woman he’s supposed to meet. He’s got piercing dark eyes and a muscular build. He used to think of himself as a wimp. Now he studies judo and already boasts a brown belt. He owns a software company and employs a fleet of Russian programmers. One sign of his newfound confidence: He sports a cowboy hat.

Then he spots her. She’s beautiful, with dark hair and a smile that makes you hold your breath. But it’s her voice that captures him. He finds the Russian inflection in her perfect English enchanting. Plus, she’s a doctor, an obstetrician. Her parents, too, are physicians. The other women he met through the Russian bride service on his regular trips here didn’t impress him. They weren’t like her. He can talk to her. And there’s something else, something magical about her. On their first night together, Reiser later tells his father, they conceive a child. Five months later, they are married.

In 2001, the Pentagon’s R&D agency awards Namesys a $600,000 grant to build the file system of the future — a hunk of code that will make everything on a computer hard drive searchable, transparent, accessible. Reiser spends long stretches in Moscow working with his team of programmers while Nina stays in the Bay Area to help oversee the company’s books.

Reiser’s father, Ramon, takes a break from teaching high school science and pitches in. Though Reiser’s parents are long divorced and Ramon was not around for much of Reiser’s childhood, he has made an effort to reconnect with his son. But Ramon soon becomes suspicious of his new daughter-in-law, who has taken the title of CFO at Namesys. Ramon was trained in military interviewing techniques before going to Vietnam and says he knows when he’s being lied to. He thinks the cash reserves are shrinking inexplicably fast. Within a year, a check bounces, and Ramon warns his son that Nina may be to blame. Reiser doesn’t believe him. To help make payroll, he accepts a loan from Sean Sturgeon, a childhood friend.

Sturgeon drove a recycling truck for years and owns a condo in Oakland’s Lake Merritt district. He isn’t rich, but the condo has appreciated. After surgery in 2002 for a torn rotator cuff, he was forced into early retirement. He gets by on disability payments, Social Security, some retirement benefits, and the proceeds from a lawsuit he filed after being in a car accident. His friendship with Reiser is a bright spot. They grew up together in Oakland, and Sturgeon wants to help his friend. He’s happy to lend the money, which he obtains by taking a loan on the equity in his condo. He writes Reiser a check for $84,000 at the beginning of 2004.

Reiser thinks of Sturgeon as a brother but is concerned about his friend’s taste for bondage and sadomasochism. Reiser once watched Sturgeon carve the letters R-A-G-E into his arm, and was alarmed when his friend told him he went to the ER after an S&M experience led to a burst blood vessel in his chest. Reiser is worried that Sturgeon is trying to teach Rory and Niorline that pain can be fun and is furious when Sturgeon gives them what Reiser refers to in a sworn court filing as “gender confused alternative sexuality dolls.”

Reiser is also upset that Sturgeon has introduced Nina to the drug ecstasy. When she asks Reiser if he wants to try it, he says no but senses she thinks less of him for refusing. “Nina and Sean both seem to be searching for more and more excitement, and going farther and farther to find it,” Reiser writes in the court papers.

Sturgeon doesn’t understand why Reiser is upset. It’s true that he was involved in the “leather” community and that he’s bisexual. But Sturgeon has started going to church, and by the beginning of 2002 he had sworn off kinky sex parties. He’s left that life behind. Either way, Reiser stayed friends with him all those years and didn’t seem to mind it at the time. Reiser even watched him carve those letters into his arm — it happened back in 1996. It was just body art — Sturgeon saw a lot of people doing it at the time. It was no big deal.

Over the course of 2004, Sturgeon feels he is growing apart from his friend. At the same time, he feels a deep connection with Nina. “She told me that wolves mate once for life and asked me if I was her wolf,” he says. “I said yes.”

Reiser fears that Nina is sleeping with Sturgeon and that the two are mixing sex with sadomasochism. Nina confirms his suspicion that they are having an affair when she files for divorce. In court filings, Reiser accuses her of being seduced by a “lewd tattooed drug addicted BDSM pimp/whore” with multiple personality disorder.

Sturgeon admits to the affair — he’s fallen in love with Nina — but denies that S&M is a part of the relationship. He also thinks Reiser has mismanaged Namesys and squandered its financial resources. He asks for his $84,000 back.

Reiser refuses to return the money. Sturgeon files suit in December, and Reiser lodges a cross-complaint claiming that Sturgeon intentionally seduced Nina in an effort to “show that he was a better man than I and to convince my wife, Nina, to conspire with him to steal the Namesys, Inc. company assets.”

Sturgeon feels that Reiser has cast aside their friendship because of greed. “You find out who your true friends are when you stop giving them money,” he says. Sturgeon believes that Reiser’s judgment has become clouded by megalomania and the belief that he is the world’s greatest programmer. The friendship is over.

Reiser agrees that the friendship is finished. He tells the divorce court that Sturgeon “has many wonderful qualities, but as he has gotten older the dark side has triumphed in him.” And as for Nina, he thinks the children need to be “protected from what appears to be a mother spiraling downwards in mental stability.”

+ request = &owner->request; + node = request->node;

Reiser wants me to do something. It’s late March, and this is my third visit to the locked meeting room inside the jail. It’s raining today; a bucket collects water in the hallway. Reiser is out of solitary, so his hands are no longer cuffed. He puts them on the table and leans toward me.

“I would like to talk you into doing something that will involve a lot of work on your part,” he says. He pauses and stares intently at me before explaining that he feels he has been discriminated against because he’s a computer geek. He wants me to investigate his custody fight and, among other things, validate his belief that violent videogames are not bad for kids. I agree to look into it and obtain a sheaf of custody filings from the case. I pore through the pages and discover that the issue of videogame violence has taken up a lot of his time over the past few years.

At the end of 2004, as the divorce and custody proceedings get under way, Nina asks Reiser to stop playing violent videogames like Battlefield Vietnam with young Rory. In that game, napalm explosions envelop villages in fire, bodies are hurled through the air, and, when shot, characters collapse to the ground and choke on their own blood, realistic sound effects included. “Hans has a deeply held unreasonable belief that it is good to show children, no matter how young, violent videos and movies,” Nina writes to the court. She wants him to stop.

For Reiser, this is not about videogames; it’s about life and death. “Little boys take to violent computer games like monkeys take to trees,” he says in a court filing. “[They] do not have instincts that favor combat rehearsal activities for no reason, they have them because they affect whether they live or die a significant amount of the time.” Violent videogames are an ideal way to hone these survival skills, for several reasons, he says. A kid is clearly not going to become battle-hardened in the quiet, idyllic neighborhoods of the Oakland hills. Reiser believes that history — in, for instance, an Electronic Arts videogame set in Vietnam — is the best teacher, though he is quick to point out that the learning process will not necessarily be easy. “Becoming a man normally is psychologically traumatic for boys,” he says. What matters most, he says, is that the exercise “allows him to achieve results in defending family and country.”

Rory has nightmares. When he’s awake, he spends time drawing monsters and soldiers, and he tells his mother that he and his father have a secret. Nina thinks that Reiser is still playing videogames with their son and worries that Rory is developing a condition called sensory integration dysfunction, which can make the smallest sound or touch overwhelming.

In the coming months, Rory is frequently sick with a high fever and a sore throat. A year earlier, he was diagnosed with fluid in his ear and treated with five courses of antibiotics, but his condition persists. Nina uses a low-voltage portable laser — a device commonly used in Russia — to zap his inflamed tissue. Rory’s health does not improve.

Reiser claims that Nina may be consulting with “memory creation specialists” in order to implant memories in Rory’s mind. He insists that he never told Rory to hide the fact that they play Battlefield Vietnam together and is convinced that the specialist created this memory. “I am just lucky these memories only involve a computer game so far,” Reiser writes to the court. “I don’t want to find out that my child remembers being satanically sacrificed by me in a past life.”

On December 22, 2004, the dispute intensifies. Reiser arrives to pick up the kids at the house Nina is renting, and, according to Nina, he shoves her to the ground. The next day, she files a request for a restraining order against Reiser — quickly granted — and reports that he threatened to “make me hurt for the rest of my life.”

Reiser is amused by the implication that he is violent. “In reality I am just a computer gamer, and when someone says I have been demented as a result of [videogame] combat the laughter comes easily,” he writes. He believes mental health professionals scorn people who “teach the culture of manhood to little boys, with all of its inherent opposition to wallowing in wimpiness.”

Reiser delves into this “culture of manhood” in a 32-page filing he submits to the court after Nina accuses him of hurting her. In it, he explains the difference between appropriate and inappropriate violence. Grand Theft Auto, for instance, demonstrates inappropriate violence because players can get away with killing innocent people. “Many other computer games heavily penalize shooting the wrong person, and I prefer those,” Reiser says.

He also has a simple solution for Rory’s nightmares: magical dynamite. “I explained to him that he could learn to fight the monsters in his dreams and blow them up with the magical dynamite,” Reiser recounts. “I did this in terms that expressed a quiet confidence that he could handle the job.

“Note the similarities between how an effective army sergeant would rally frightened men to learn to attack the enemy and the technique I used to teach a small boy to deal with monsters in his dreams,” Reiser adds. “One of the sad facts of dream life is that monsters who are lots of joy to blow up will start to leave one’s dreams and not want to return.”

Reiser says he has a right to blow up monsters, whether in dreams or videogames. The government — in the guise of family court — should have no place prohibiting him or his son from playing Battlefield Vietnam or Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic, a fantasy strategy game featuring elves, dwarves, zombies, and wizards. “Should the government be keeping me from showing my son how to direct brave goblin suicide bombers against their elven oppressors?” he asks.

To Reiser, a fundamental bias is at work. “Male geeks, such as myself, are one of America’s most hated cultural minorities,” he writes. “Unlike racial hatred, it is considered socially acceptable to indulge in such hatred.”

Nina, he feels, has exploited this bias. “I am tired of being the punching bag,” he concludes. “I could forgive the fighting, and even the mental instability and unfaithfulness, but not the scamming and the lying. Let the children and I leave this all behind. Leave them to me, and let Nina go her way.”

Six days after Nina’s disappearance, Oakland police find her minivan parked 3 miles from the house where Reiser lives with his mother. The groceries are still in it, tipped over and rotting. Her purse sits on the front passenger seat and contains $94.07 in cash and her cell phone, though the battery has been removed and sits loose in the purse. The van’s console holds another $24.60 and one euro. There are no fingerprints other than Nina’s.

Reiser’s Honda Civic CRX has also disappeared. Beverly, Reiser’s mother, reports that her son took her car, a Honda hybrid, the weekend Nina disappeared. At the time, Beverly, 64, was in the Nevada desert at the Burning Man festival. She’s a conceptual artist and had gone there to show her Hopeandfearometer, a video kiosk that asks two questions: “What makes you glow?” and “What dangers do you delight in?” The device records responses and then, according to an online description, plays them back in “a cacophonous medley of random hopes and fears.”

On her return to Oakland, Beverly is confronted with her own set of hopes and fears. She asks for her car back, but her son refuses, saying that his isn’t working. Reiser also tells her that Nina has gone missing. Her ex-husband, Ramon, has warned their son to be careful; he thinks Nina might have gotten involved with the Russian mafia.

The Oakland police think otherwise and unleash a surveillance team to track Reiser. Unmarked cars trail him as he drives his mother’s hybrid. They follow him to his children’s school, as he gets coffee, and along the winding roads in the Oakland hills. An airplane is dispatched to track him, and his phone is tapped. Still, police cannot locate the missing CRX. There are two explanations for Reiser’s reaction to the surveillance:

+ if (in_panic == 0) { + in_panic = 1;

Version 00 Though the police believe Reiser is unaware that they are following him, they observe him taking countersurveillance measures. He accelerates slowly on the freeway that skirts the edge of Oakland and then floors it, only to take the next exit at the last possible moment. He drives in circles through a residential neighborhood. He acts like someone who has something to hide.

Version 01 Reiser calls his dad and explains that unmarked cars and maybe an airplane are tracking him. In Ramon’s opinion, it’s an operation beyond the scope of local police. It sounds like the Russian mafia, Ramon says, or maybe the Russian spy agency, the FSB. He tells his son to take evasive action: Exit freeways without warning, drive in circles. “Do anything you can to lose them and protect yourself.”

+ ->trace_flags + ->debug_flags

On September 13, the Oakland police get a search warrant to scour the Reiser household. They find a drop of blood on a support post in the entry. Oakland’s crime lab identifies the sample as a mix of Nina’s and Reiser’s, though it can’t determine how old the blood is. Five days later, the police follow Reiser to the CRX, which is parked on a quiet street in nearby Berkeley. He moves it to a secluded, wooded area of Oakland and dashes uphill toward his mother’s house 3 miles away.

Police search the CRX and find that the front passenger seat has recently been removed. The floor is soaked, as if it had been washed. There are heavy-duty garbage bags, cloth towels, masking tape, and two books: Masterpieces of Murder and Homicide. Police also find another drop of blood and match it to Nina.

+ warning(“Target found unexpectedly”); + result = RETERR(-EIO);

It’s a warm Sunday morning in May, and I’m in the last pew at All Nations Presbyterian Church in an Oakland suburb. Light streams through stained glass and illuminates floating motes of dust. A smattering of congregants stand and recite prayers. I’ve come here because Sean Sturgeon — Reiser’s childhood friend and Nina’s ex-lover — has invited me, though I’ve yet to spot him. He wants me to understand that he is a Christian now. He is eager for me to know this because last week, on the phone, he told me he had killed eight people.

“The taste of death will not defile us,” the congregation chants. I think back to the previous Sunday. My phone rang late at night. The caller ID read prison. It was Reiser. His defense team had just gotten a call from a deputy district attorney, who told them that Sturgeon had confessed to a number of killings but denied any connection to Nina’s case. The confession had come months ago, early in the investigation of Nina’s disappearance. Reiser sounded giddy. Surely this would raise reasonable doubt in jurors’ minds.

The next afternoon, Sturgeon called me. I had been trying to reach him for two months. Now he was breathing into my ear. If I knew all the details of his friendship with Reiser, he said, I “would weep piss and blood.”

I didn’t know where to begin. If he’d actually killed eight people, the police would have arrested him, right? Why hadn’t this come out before? Was he fantasizing? When I called the DA, he refused to comment, citing a gag order issued three days earlier by the judge in the Reiser case. Oakland police also refuse to comment, citing the gag order.

“We are the raisers of the dead,” intones a woman standing in the chancel. “The power of death will not defy us.”

I sense Sturgeon before I see him. He has appeared to my left, staring at me with pale blue eyes. He is unshaven, and the skin around his right eye twitches.

“Hello,” he says and then turns his attention to the service.

“The spirit of death will not destroy us,” the crowd mutters in a monotone.

We sit silently, side by side for the hour-long liturgy and, when it is over, stand in the lobby and talk about the people Sturgeon says he killed; the rest of the congregation sips coffee and chats.

He explains that he was abused as a child. As an adult, he targeted those who had hurt him. “If you aren’t one of those people,” he says, “you have nothing to fear.” And now that he’s a Christian, he is no longer violent. He says he stopped killing in 1995 and made a full confession to the police investigating Nina’s disappearance. He did it without a lawyer because he wanted to prove that he had nothing to hide. Even so, he won’t tell me anything that might help confirm the killings, like the names of his victims, claiming that the information would draw attention away from the facts in Reiser’s case. But he continues to cooperate with the police, even inviting them to check his gun collection and test whether the weapons had recently been fired. “Give me some sodium pentothal or any truth serum, put a little ecstasy in there and ask me if I killed Nina,” he says. “I have never been a threat to her.”

The last time he called Nina was the Friday before she disappeared. He wanted to find a good time to drop off some money. He hadn’t seen her for four months — as part of the court-approved divorce agreement, Sturgeon was barred from visiting the kids, who stayed mostly with Nina. The enforced separation strained their relationship, until they finally broke up. Still, Sturgeon wanted to help her financially. Reiser was often late with child-support payments, and Nina didn’t have a full-time job. “I was her ‘maid of honor’ when she married Hans; I wasn’t going to let her down,” Sturgeon says, explaining that he dressed up as a woman for the wedding and stood beside Nina for the service. After their friendship turned romantic, Sturgeon felt even more compelled to chip in. “I don’t just sleep with a woman and say, ‚See you later, I had my fun.'” He wouldn’t abandon her. Nina, he explains, thought of him as her mate for life, her wolf.

The coffee hour ends, and we file out into the sun with the other congregants. We talk for a few more minutes, and then I watch Sturgeon get into his Subaru and drive away. The car has two large images of wolves stuck on the hatchback.

Reiser’s lips are chapped, cracked, and peeling. It is my fourth and final visit, and I have asked him to tell me where he thinks Nina is. He doesn’t answer. He wants to talk about his file system again.

While he launches into the intricacies of database science, I’m thinking, “Where is the front passenger seat of your car?” He has never explained this. It seems a fundamental hole in his defense. But he won’t stop talking. When I try to interrupt, he insists I let him finish. It’s as if the file system holds all the answers.

So I take the hint, and that night, in my office, I start scouring the 80,496 lines of the Reiser4 source code. Eventually I stumble across a passage that starts at line 78,077. It’s not part of the program itself — it’s an annotation, a piece of non-executable text in plain English. It’s there for the benefit of someone who has chosen to read this far into the code. The passage explains how memory structures are born, grow, and eventually die. It concludes: “Death is a complex process.”